Aperto The Thing, 2016 [selected]

Boris Groys: “The Mayakovsky Monument captures the moment when the avant-garde turned into an imperial project”

In an interview with Alexander Shein, director of the film Mayakovsky, philosopher and art theorist Boris Groys talks about the fate of the avant-garde project, the meaning of the Mayakovsky Monument, and humanity’s acceptance of its destruction.

 Alexander Shein: It is an interesting paradox that on Moscow’s main street there are monuments to two opposite Russian poets, Pushkin and Mayakovsky. How would you explain this?

Boris Groys: I don’t think they are opposites. On the contrary, they are quite congenial, since both synthesized Westernism and Slavophilism. Pushkin, on the one hand, has French and English, Byronic, components. On the other, as the author of Boris Godunov and a supporter of a strong regime and empire, he was a Slavophile. Mayakovsky was a revolutionary and rebel but absolutely pro-government. He sang the praises of the Soviet passport and, at the same time, history’s momentum. He produced the ROSTA Windows, meaning he appealed to the general public, but formally his poetry was elitist. The Mayakovsky Monument is a monument to this successful synthesis. Interestingly, today you can catch sight of a copy of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International on the roof of the building behind it. It reminded me of walking around Guangzhou, where models of famous buildings have been installed on the roofs. They have everything: the Empire State Building, the Kremlin, and the Eiffel Tower. In the evenings, the roofs are highlighted, and you get the impression you are in a heavenly Jerusalem where the great buildings of all ages have come together.

How was it that in the midst of the socialist realist era, in 1958, a monument to a hooligan and Futurist appeared in downtown Moscow? There is something cognitively dissonant about it.

I don’t see that. Socialist realism, especially socialist realism of the Stalinist period, had come out of Futurism and continued to be avant-garde in the sense of wanting to change the world and transform people’s minds. It was not 19th-century realism, a reflection of reality. Socialist realist was a reflection of absolutely nothing, but it provided a fantastic vision of what should be. It was still a Futurist, avant-garde style of art, garbed in pseudo-realist forms. Such is the monument on Triumphal Square. It is Futurist in content, because it depicts Mayakovsky, but realist in form, because the depiction is verisimilar. Socialist realism is a specific form of Futurism. There is this German concept that comes from Clausewitz and Bismarck, Realpolitik, realistic policy. It does not reflect the real state of things but aims to achieve tangible results. It is not utopian. It limits itself as it were and wants to be real, to stand on the ground of reality. Socialist realism is basically Futurist Realpolitik. Compare the Mayakovsky Monument with the Monument to the Third International and you will see the huge gap between the aesthetic of early and late Futurism. 

Did Mayakovsky want a monument erected to him?

Mayakovsky constantly polemicized with Pushkin, who “raised a monument to [himself] not made by human hands.” Mayakovsky wrote, “I don’t want any monument.” But he got one anyway, and was nearly the last poet canonized in this way. There is something Christian about it, but something pagan as well, and both these circumstances apparently irritated him then. But he certainly felt that if he held on for a little longer no monument to him would be erected and he would either have had to become a much too semi-official poet or be exposed as an insufficiently semi-official poet. By committing suicide, Mayakovsky opened the way for his canonization. And at that very moment, Russia became more of an empire than ever before and made the turn from the avant-garde to neoclassicism. Ultimately, they managed to turn Mayakovsky into a Greek Revival-Roman statue god.

 Through the Mayakovsky Monument?

Do you remember the Roman galleries of monuments to poets? This powerful Roman tradition was revived in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. A turn from time to space thus occurred, from dynamism and revolutionary development to the creation of a huge static empire. And Mayakovsky entered it as a monument. He miraculously managed the transition from the avant-garde to neoclassicism because he had a good intuition and sense of the time. He knew he was not enough. 

Was this the gesture of an artist or passionarian?

Of an artist, of course. Mayakovsky was too good a craftsman to have any other motivation than art. He predicted the moment when avant-garde Russia would be converted into the Stalinist empire, and, respectively, he later turned into a monument himself. If he had not understood it he would not have discussed the issue of a monument to himself almost his entire poetic career.

You can imagine a running avant-garde that gradually turns into a discus thrower and congeals into the monument on Mayakovsky Square.

Yes, that is a great idea: Leni Riefenstahl in reverse. Her runners and discuss throwers come into motion. This was compensation, as it were: there had been no avant-garde at all in Germany. There was Expressionism and Dadaism, but no avant-garde. Strictly speaking, Riefenstahl created a retrospective avant-garde in Olympia: everyone is running. So Mayakovsky buzzed around the world like a Leni Riefenstahl film played in reverse.

Meaning he imparted the avant-garde’s inertia to the state but ended up a monument himself. He pushed it forward and congealed into a monument.

Yes, and he found himself in the mystical realm of the pagan gods. After all, the ancients were never quite clear as to whether Venus lived in statues of Venus or not. The pagan mind, unlike the Christian mind, vacillated when it came to answering this question. When Osmolovsky climbed onto the Mayakovsky Monument, it was a successful work. The gesture was a good illustration of the ambivalence. Osmolovsky had perched either on a statue or Mayakovsky’s shoulder and his poetry.

The Mayakovsky Monument is a monument to what?

To the moment when the avant-garde turned into an imperial project. Shklovsky wrote that time is always right and we should do what the times demand. Mayakovsky shared this point of view. When the times demanded a revolutionary gesture, he made it. When they demanded a hundred Party booklets, he wrote them. When they demanded advertising, he produced the ROSTA Windows. When it was necessary to become a monument, he did this too. Like Shklovsky, Mayakovsky had a remarkable ability to listen to the times and carry out their demands.

In the standard representation, Mayakovsky was a rebel. He wanted to change the times. He was at odds with them. He wanted to smash the foundations.

No way. “Like it or not, sleep, my pretty” is the principle of all cultural work. If you produce culture you know you are condemned to your own time and cannot leap out of it. This fatalism can be either unconscious or self-reflective. The times are really our destiny. They define us, and the only question is how consciously we work with them. In this sense, Mayakovsky consciously worked with his own time because he accepted it.

It seems to me that he did not accept his own time. This comes through in his last poem, or rather, in the prologue to poem “Aloud and Straight”: “Raking / the petrified muck of today, / probing the darkness that once impenned us, / you may chance / to ask about me. / And I daresay, / one of your scientists will utter, / erudition / hushing / curiosity to awe, / that, well, / there was / such a bard of boiled water / and rabid enemy / of water raw.”[1]

The question of whether you have accepted the times in which you live or not is secondary, in terms of your fate, vis-à-vis the question of the whether the times have accepted you. This, for example, was manifested in quite rare form when some Jews came to believe in Nazism and tried to persuade everyone they were the same as the fascists. But no one believed them. Their timing was bad. It was the same thing with Mayakovsky. He published many Party booklets and tried to persuade everyone he was a proletarian poet. But all the literary critics of the time said he was a petit bourgeois individualist who performed in a yellow jacket and hailed from the anti-communist extremist and radical scene. He could try and persuade everyone from morning till night that he had been reeducated, but ultimately no one believed him. He would say, “I am on your side, dear comrades,” but they would reply, “You are on our side seemingly, but basically you’re an anti-Soviet scumbag, and we don’t want you on our side.” I think Mayakovsky’s fate lies in store for all of us.

And what fate is that?

In 1956, the Austrian writer Günther Anders wrote a book entitled Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, which has been translated as The Outdatedness of Human Beings and The Obsolescence of Man. According to Anders, whereas earlier, individual self-destruction was a private affair, nowadays an individual’s will to death can impact the destiny of all humankind. There are technical means for doing this: nuclear weapons, for example. Meaning that in some sense humanity has already died, having ceased to be an ontological constant. It has become mortal, helpless in the face of its own evolution, and it cannot control technological, civilizational progress. Consequently, we are involved in a process in which humans are increasingly alienated from the conditions of their existence. This will undoubtedly lead humanity to destruction. What is the avant-garde? It is the subject’s alienation from the normal conditions of its existence. In other words, all humanity has became one big Mayakovsky. This is a metaphor, of course. But, say, Lars von Trier, in Melancholia, shows us the possibility of accepting total destruction. The heroine in Melancholia embodies the Nietzschean principle of accepting one’s destruction as something desirable. Naked, she lies down before the asteroid and awaits a simultaneous encounter with orgasm and death. Her body is open to the asteroid and manifests acceptance of this fate.

Where does progress lead us?

Progress is destruction.

Why? In what form?

It’s hard to say. It could be a nuclear war or anything whatsoever. In this sense, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov (and, before him, Hegel) was right: progress is not destructive in relation to every individual generation. Progress is based on each generation’s dying for the sake of the next generation and so on, sacrificing itself for the sake of moving forward and not getting anything in return. So Fyodorov wanted to promote the idea of reviving previous generations by technological means as a way of somehow offsetting this death machine. Progress is a death machine that senselessly destroys one generation after another.

What is the avant-garde nowadays?

The avant-garde has been transformed from project into destiny. In the early 20th century, the avant-garde was an attempt to navigate the past and the morass of the present, the stability and flabbiness of the bourgeois lifestyle, and break through into the future, generate incredible momentum amidst stagnation. Nowadays, there is no stagnation. A fast and powerful process of technological and political evolution is underway in which people constantly have to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of their lives. The avant-garde has now become a form of timeserving. We all live amidst avant-garde conformism. The only reality in our lives is constant change to which we are constantly striving to adapt. My computer is always demanding an update. The lives of my friends and my life are self-updates. We are always under the pressure of needing to self-modernize. And in this sense we do not practice avant-gardism but live in the avant-garde. We are avant-garde conformists.

And in this case the Black Square is an end or beginning?

Well… (laughs)

Or is it a portal?

Yes, it is the end of the beginning.

 Meaning a way beyond zero?

Yes. The avant-garde did it at the exhibition 0.10. Ten people passed through zero, meaning through death. Malevich was quite inspired by Kruchonykh’s book A Game in Hell. The idea there was that the death of culture and civilization has already occurred as it were; only the Black Square remains. But this does not prevent the characters from rejoicing. They are playing; they are alive. For those ten artists, at least, life had defeated death. Only the avant-garde could do it that way.

Aperto Raum The Thing, 2016. All rights reserved

[1] Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Aloud and Straight: First Prologue to a Poem of the Five-Year Plan,” in: Vladimir Mayakovsky, Poems, transl. Dorian Rottenberg (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 261.